Freight broker TMS migration, without breaking the floor.

For a 5-25 broker SMB shop on AscendTMS or Aljex, 2-4 weeks elapsed time from contract signature to full cutover is realistic. For a 25-200 broker mid-market 3PL on McLeod or Aljex with deep customization, 6-10 weeks elapsed is realistic, with phased rollout across desks. For a 200+ broker enterprise with EDI pipelines and multiple brands on different TMSs, 12-20 weeks is realistic with the overlay pattern usually preferable to outright replacement. Anyone quoting 'one week' for a real broker TMS migration is either underscoping the carrier-data work or overpromising.

Five buckets in priority order. (1) Carrier records — name, MC, DOT, payment terms, insurance docs, factor company assignment. (2) Customer/shipper records — same fields plus credit terms, billing addresses, accessorial agreements. (3) Active loads in flight — anything not yet invoiced. (4) Historical loads — typically the trailing 12-24 months for AR/AP reconciliation and tax. (5) Rate-confirmation templates, document templates, and report templates. The first three are non-negotiable; the historical loads are negotiable based on your accounting cutover plan.

Three things, in roughly this order. (1) Trying to cut over the entire floor on a single day instead of phased per-desk. (2) Migrating dirty data — duplicate carrier records, outdated insurance docs, stale shipper credit info — and then debugging it inside the new TMS. Clean it in the old TMS first. (3) Underestimating the broker retraining cost. A senior broker can move 20-30 loads/day on muscle memory; the first week in a new TMS that drops to 8-12. Plan for the productivity dip.

If your brokerage has working EDI pipelines to top shippers (204 tenders, 214 statuses, 210 invoices), those integrations took quarters to build and you should treat them as load-bearing. Keelway supports EDI ingestion and outbound, but the cutover for established EDI pairs needs a careful test plan with the shipper's IT team. Most enterprise customers run EDI in parallel between the old and new TMS for 2-4 weeks before cutting over.

Honest take: if you have a sticky enterprise TMS investment (McLeod LoadMaster with two years of customization, Aljex with working EDI, MercuryGate with a built-out reporting suite), the overlay pattern is almost always the right answer for the first 12 months. Run Keelway as the AI layer on top, get the productivity gains, and revisit migration when your TMS contract is up for renewal. For brokerages on aging legacy TMSs without sticky investment — BrokerWare, older Aljex deployments, in-house spreadsheets — replacement is usually the right answer.